The Information Manifold

Although this is the Information Age, there is no universal agreement about what information really is. Different disciplines view information differently; engineers, computer scientists, economists, linguists, and philosophers all take varying and apparently disconnected approaches. In this book, Antonio Badia distinguishes four levels of analysis brought to bear on information: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and network-based. Badia explains each of these theoretical approaches in turn, discussing, among other topics, theories of Claude Shannon and Andrey Kolomogorov, Fred Dretske''s description of information flow, and ideas on receiver impact and informational interactions. Badia argues that all these theories describe the same phenomena from different perspectives, each one narrower than the previous one. The syntactic